Murder Room
5 total works
The enormously wealthy Durie family occupies a gigantic baroque turn-of-the-century mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The family, whose fortune was established in Colonial times, is traditionally shy of all public notice and proud that no scandal has ever touched its name.
Newly married Michael and Amy Lloyd, bright young teachers in a private school, suddenly find themselves unemployed and apparently unemployable. When all cash and credit are gone, Michael and Amy decide to take up positions on the Durie household staff. But as the Lloyds learn to cope with their positions as servants they slowly become aware that the seventy-year-old matriarch Margaret Durie is, for her own unexplained reasons, enlisting them as her helpless accomplices in a subtly designed series of events that will ultimately lead to a thunderous scandal ... and a ghastly death.
James Flood, just released from a Florida prison, has a desperate scheme. He and his recruits, all hardened criminals, will move in upon a prominent upstate New York family, holding the Hayworth women as hostages while awaiting delivery of a four-million-dollar ransom. Marcus Hayworth, a leading member of the Quaker community, is convinced he can subvert Flood's plan. Instead of going to the police, he asks the Quaker community to back him in non-violent opposition.
Subsequent events isolate both hostages and captors within the Hayworth house, waging a war of nerves that involves more than a clash between good and evil. For Flood has an urgent and specific need for revenge. And Hayworth's principles have never been put to the ultimate test.
At ten, David Shaw, a silent and observant little boy already fluent in half a dozen languages, was being dragged through the capitals of Europe by a diplomat father and a beautiful scatterbrained mother. At twenty, in the midst of the troubled 1960s, David abruptly disappeared from his Ivy League college - to be reborn as Jan Van Zee, amiable Dutch drifter, making his way around Europe and working as an occasional courier for a syndicate of smugglers.
At thirty he is cruelly betrayed and left for dead by the syndicate, and now lives only for revenge against an apparently all-powerful and invulnerable foe. Reverting to his true identity, David returns to America to claim his vast inheritance, and sets out to execute a consummate vengeance against each of the syndicate's three bosses
